[WikiEN-l] Inconvenience

[John Lee]

On 3/21/07, wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
>
> > From: "John Lee" <johnleemk at gmail.com>
>
> > > What's the point of that? It would be better to wait until you've
> > > found the sources before you start writing...
> > >
> > > Citing sources should be easy because they should be the actual source
> > > of the information, which you will already know since it's whatever
> > > you just finished reading.
> >
> > This strikes me as a rather inconvenient process.
>
> It's known as "work." Writing is work. Writing an encyclopedia is work.


What constitutes work? You're speaking in truisms - I'm sure we all agree
writing an encyclopaedia is work, but what would you define as constituting
work? Demanding that I have a book open and in front of me when all the
requisite information for a stub is in my head (this used to be especially
common when we didn't have anything close to a million articles, and I'm
sure it's still common for many editors from areas subject to systemic
bias) strikes me as demanding form over function. Should I wear a suit and
tie when I edit?

> Perhaps other people work
> > at things differently, but I rarely directly refer to sources when
> starting
> > an article unless I know little about it. The only exception is when I
> have
> > sources and am not sure what articles could use them, in which case I
> hunt
> > through the book/whatever for things I could write about. Otherwise,
> when I
> > want to write about something in general (especially when it's on
> impulse,
> > normally after "what? this is a redlink?"), it's often inefficient and
> > frustrating to hunt down a source.
>
> Why is it any more "convenient" to do this in the main article space than
> in your own user space?


Wait, are we talking about crappy, half-written drafts, or decent stubs? An
article can be a draft and a stub (i.e. the editor intends to return to the
article to flesh it out later), or it can be a "finished" stub (although
this seems a bit oxymoronic), or it can just be a draft. The latter is
clearly unsuited for article space, but the former two are perfectly fine. A
stub-quality article is better off in article space than in userspace; a
half-written draft stub is not.

> Call me an eventualist,
>
> I don't call this eventualism.
>
> I call this rehearsing in front of the audience.
>
> I call this running out into the street naked and telling the policeman
> "But I was just about to put my clothes on."


If you have a problem with the fundamental premise of Wikipedia that we
write an encyclopaedia while our readers are browsing it, maybe this isn't
the right project for you. :-p

Johnleemk